Information for Faculty Sponsors

Faculty Sponsor Duties: Faculty members who have agreed to sponsor a student presentation are expected to serve as advisors to the student as they prepare their work for the Symposium. An important aspect of your role is to provide guidance about what the professional expectations are for a scholarly project in your (or the student’s) discipline, keeping in mind that the Symposium is a showcase for undergraduate research only.

We expect that you will be available to

review their work prior to the Symposium,

inspect finished posters for those presenters who choose that format, or

listen to practice talks for those who are giving oral presentations.

Students whose work is accepted for presentation will also be seeking you out during the first weeks of spring term in order to obtain your signature on their registration forms.

Although we strongly encourage faculty to inform their students about the Rall Symposium and to offer support to students who wish to submit their work, we strongly discourage faculty from serving as the driving force behind the project. Students who submit their work to the Symposium must be committed to seeing the project through to its successful presentation on the day of the Symposium and must take ownership over the project in order to do so.